"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and learn new things."--Admiral Grace Hopper

"Amazing Grace" was born on December 9, 1906. She was the first child of Walter and Mary Murray and was named after Mary Murray's best friend, Grace Brewster. Her sister Mary was born in 1909, and her brother Roger was born in 1911. When Grace was a child she spent most of her days at her parent's cottage near Lake Wentworth in Wolfboro, New Hampshire. She enjoyed playing the piano, reading, and playing the children's game of hide-and-seek.

Another one of her hobbies was taking objects apart. One time she wanted to see how her alarm clock worked, so she took it apart! It took her seven alarm clocks to find out how to put hers back together. In high school Grace played basketball, water polo, and field hockey.

SA year at Vassar Collage for Grace was postponed after she failed a Latin exam. Instead she became a boarding student at Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. When she was seventeen, she was accepted to Vassar Collage and started studying mathematics and physics. She graduated from Vassar in 1928.

When she was working toward her Ph. D. in mathematics at Yale University , she was one of only four women who were in a doctorate program that had ten pupils. She returned to Vassar in 1931 and started teaching math. In 1941 she won a faculty fellowship at New York University's Courant Institute for Mathematics.

Hopper joined the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volentary Emergency Service) in the December of 1943. The next year in June she was entitled a lieutenant. She worked in other jobs such as the Senior Mathematician at Eckert-Machly Computer Corporation, the Systems Manager at Sperry Corporation, and the Senior Consultant at Digitial Equitment Corporation.

The most remarkable thing Grace Murray Hopper is famous for is starting the term "computer bug." One day she was working on the computer called the Mark II when it suddenly turned off. She took the Mark II apart and found that a moth flew right into it. This started the term "debugging a computer" that we use today.